


a joy forever

by epiproctan



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Accidental Confession, Disaster gay Shiro, M/M, Post-Season/Series 06, me using Shiro as an outlet for my Keith thirst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 11:43:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15363897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epiproctan/pseuds/epiproctan
Summary: Keith glances up from his work, darts his gaze down, then meets Shiro’s eyes when it registers that he’s being looked at. They catch and hold. Keith’s grin is a little cheeky in the way that it sneaks across his lips, playing tug-o-war at the corners. It’s made out of fresh, homegrown self-confidence and a sprinkling of embarrassment. Keith has the looks meant for gazes but he never wants them.“What are you looking at?” he asks. “Something on my face?”Shiro, helpless and hopeless, drinks him in with a ferocity he can’t keep tamped down.“You’re gorgeous.”Or, Shiro makes the best mistake of his life





	a joy forever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flyingisland](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/gifts).



> for the brilliant, talented, and wonderful moth <3 she wrote me far more words than she owed me in [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14831211), so i offered to write her something in return to make up for it. she requested...something kinda like this? haha. moth i adore you more than words can say and i hope you like this because you deserve something nice!
> 
> also bless han and dracs for being amazing beta readers and even better friends <3

“How do we know it’s safe to eat?”

The way Keith’s hands run over the carcass, feeling the places where joints connect and organs lay and bone rests between the skin, is practiced and unhesitating.

“We don't,” Keith replies. His hand darts to his back faster than Shiro’s eye can track. When it reemerges before him the glint of dark luxite shines off his blade. “I’ll try it first.”

“Keith…,” Shiro says, but Keith isn’t paying him much attention. Instead he’s twirling the knife in his hand, measuring the carcass with his eyes, and then,

_ shwip _

The blade bites through the hide in a straight, clean line. Keith wrenches it back, and hacks into the animal again, almost effortlessly precise. It’s the way he fights, too, unhesitating and powerful, striking where he needs to. Every motion is swift and sure. There’s no energy wasted. The knife slices through muscle unerringly. The thick cerulean blood that pours out around Keith’s hands doesn’t deter him at all.

“Keith,” Shiro tries again, though his heart is one foe that he’s helpless against. “We shouldn’t eat anything that’s not safe.”

“You need protein to heal,” Keith says, his eyes downturned towards his prey as he moves. His hair falls in front of his face, dappling his brow with the filtered sunlight of the high-canopied forest. His bangs bob with the jerks and heaves of his shoulders.

Shiro’s heard heat-scorched tales of the desert and the stories of an isolated two years on the back of a space whale. He knows Keith can survive regardless of his environment. But to watch him provide dinner with nothing but his two hands and knife and his fire-spark will is the difference between knowing there’s a lion in the jungle and coming face to face with it.

Things haven’t been easy since Shiro was resurrected and the team lost the Castle of Lions. The journey to Earth, to  _ anywhere _ advanced enough to lend the universe’s final hope a helping hand, has been a slow crawl through an unforgiving cosmos. They’ve had to adjust to the lack of amenities it never even occurred to the rest of the team to be grateful to have. Things like showers, food goo at 3 AM, and separate living spaces.

But it hasn’t been all bad. Shiro, who has lived through worse, counts his blessings.

Number one: even elbow-deep in unfamiliar organs, Keith is an unparalleled sight to behold.

* * *

 

Open space is tranquil. In the vacuum, there’s not much to disturb a linear flight path. Still, Keith sits with a ramrod spine in the pilot’s chair, and the way his fingers curve over the controls suggest that he’s ready for anything. The comms volume is turned down to its lowest setting without being off entirely; if someone shouted for him, he would hear, but it’s quiet enough to tune out the fact that Hunk and Lance have spoken in nothing but food puns for the past forty doboshes.

Shiro lingers at the rear of the cockpit. From here, he can see the stars. They’re so distant, but they find homes in the dark of Keith’s hair, highlighting its dips and waves. If Shiro stands in the right spot, he can watch their light trace the arch of Keith’s nose, the curve of his cheek, the plumpest part of his bottom lip. His eyes. It shines in his eyes like they’re its origin and not its reflection.

If Shiro could draw, the way he knows Keith does in the rare moments he lets himself scavenge around for a scrap of paper, this is what he would put the pencil to the page for.

But Keith isn’t a piece of artwork. He’s not a roped-off installment in a museum. The thought of that makes Shiro’s chest ache, because there’s so much more splendor to Keith than just what Shiro can see with his eyes. Sometimes it’s enough to look at him, but sometimes it’s not. It makes it all the better, all the more beautiful, Shiro thinks, that Keith is a thing he can interact with, that he can have an effect on, that can have an effect on him.

So Shiro asks, “You doing okay?”

The words make Keith looser. He rolls his shoulders back and flexes his fingers as he twists towards Shiro in his chair.

“Yeah,” he says. “You?”

“You’ve been sitting here like this for hours,” Shiro replies in place of answering. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

Keith allows Shiro a small grin over his shoulder before shifting his weight further back into the chair.

“It’s fine, Shiro,” he says. “I like flying.”

It must be true, because his mouth and his brow rest at peace as he stares out into star-speckled infinity. Shiro knows which of the two he’d rather look at.

Something insistent bubbles from a place between Shiro’s lungs and into his throat, but he snaps his teeth shut against it before it can escape.

* * *

In his right hand, Keith holds the hilt of his blade. In his left, a cloth. The flat of the blade, elongated, rests across Keith’s thighs as he sits on the dusky purple rock of this rugged planet at the feet of the Black Lion. The easy comfort of Keith breathing beside him, the regular motion of his hands in Shiro’s peripheral, has made a good soundtrack for Shiro to trace glowing star maps. But it’s inevitable that with each second that passes his attention diverts itself more towards the glow of skin in the weak light filtering through buttercup yellow clouds.

Keith glances up from his work, darts his gaze down, then meets Shiro’s eyes when it registers that he’s being looked at. They catch and hold. Keith’s grin is a little cheeky in the way that it sneaks across his lips, playing tug-o-war at the corners. It’s made out of fresh, homegrown self-confidence and a sprinkling of embarrassment. Keith has the looks meant for gazes but he never wants them.

“What are you looking at?” he asks. “Something on my face?”

There is. There is something on Keith’s face and it’s the point of a perfect nose. It’s the natural curl of black, thick lashes around dark ember eyes. It’s the fair skin stretched over a cheekbone, over the line of a defined jaw, over the slope of a throat. It’s a long tapering stripe of pinkened skin that still makes Shiro’s heart lurch in his chest whenever he sees it, but somehow only highlights Keith’s wild otherworldliness. It’s a pair of lips, chapped and bitten but the most delectable, devourable shape that this universe has ever seen.

Shiro, helpless and hopeless, drinks this in with a ferocity he can’t keep tamped down.

“You’re gorgeous.”

The time it takes for Shiro to register that these words were produced by his own vocal cords is the lifetime of a star in his chest. Keith stares at him, face frozen still, eyes wide and a dark mouth showing from between parted lips.

Shiro stares back in kind, but he’s suddenly hollow. A vacuum in his stomach threatens to collapse his physical form into a dense, compact little ball. He wishes it would, because he can feel the mortification and horror coming to fill him up with thick, unbearable nausea.

He meant it. Of course he meant it. Shiro can’t imagine a reality where he would look upon Keith and not forget how to breathe in the wake of a beauty so raw and rough. But meaning something in your heart and your brain and saying it aloud are two different things. There are shattered shards of broken glass that can’t be mended and knots that can’t be untied. Entropy is at a rise throughout the universe and there’s nothing Shiro can do to stop it.

“Shiro,” Keith says, and his flint-striking voice burns the hole through Shiro’s chest that it always does when shaped liked his name.

“I’ve gotta—,” Shiro says, and pushes himself to his feet with his only arm. “I’ve gotta go.”

The finality in his tone says the conversation’s over before it’s happened. He walks away and draws a line as he goes.

* * *

 

Shiro boards the Black Lion before anyone else, and sits himself in the back of the cockpit. When Keith gets on next, on his way to the pilot seat, their eyes snap to each other like magnets. Keith’s mouth opens, and a bolt of irrational fear lances through Shiro. He turns his head away, as though Keith isn’t the only thing in the universe that he wants to look at.

But Shiro is an adult. This is a war, not a schoolyard playground, and he can handle interpersonal situations in a mature and civil manner. He stands, braces himself, and calls Keith’s name.

Keith has just settled into his chair, but at Shiro’s voice he twists to look at him. His eyes are wide in question, a single eyebrow raised, and the air is snatched instantly from Shiro’s lungs. He reaches for words and finds that none exist, not when Keith is enough to render all of them meaningless.

“What’s up?” Keith asks, voice low and soft, when Shiro doesn’t say anything.

In a second earnest attempt at communication, Shiro says, “Keith, I—”

The excited scuffling of paws on the gangplank announces company. Shiro’s mouth shuts with a clack of his teeth, and it’s well-timed. Krolia enters, the cosmic wolf on her heels. If she notices the yawning space between her son and his best friend as they take to space, she says nothing.

* * *

 

The next time Shiro talks to Keith, has an actual conversation with him, isn’t until the next day.

It’s not of his own volition. Shiro knows Keith. Although Shiro believes in him, knows that something like a few unintended words might not change anything between them, he also  _ knows _ Keith. He knows that he’s all soft tissue under his thick carapace, that lesser things have sent Keith’s sense of self spiraling like he’s lost his starboard wing. Shiro wouldn’t dare to initiate any sort of conversation without respecting Keith’s need to deal with his own emotions in a way that he’s comfortable with.

“Mom,” Keith calls back through the Lion.

Krolia appears from the back chamber, sparing a sideways glance for Shiro before striding to Keith’s side.

“The map’s kinda weird here,” Keith says to her, in a quiet voice. A secret question Shiro had always kept in his heart was what kind of voice Keith would use to talk to his parents, if he’d had any. Now that he does, the question is answered. It’s respectful, but affectionate. Soft. They say you can tell a lot about a person by the way they talk to their parents, and Shiro never would have assumed that Keith would talk to someone he loved in any other way.

“We want to avoid the gravity of this star,” Krolia replies, her fingers interrupting shapes and orbits on the holomap. “It’ll slow us down.”

“This way, then,” Keith says, reaching up to trace a route.

Krolia makes a noncommittal sound, appraising the map.

“Shiro,” she says, eyes glued to the phantom shapes of the systems. “What do you think?”

Shiro would have already been at Keith’s shoulder if it wasn’t for his own stupidity. He nears now, his mind already involved in the problem of the map. It is a tricky situation, he sees as he come closer. The wrong route could easily add days to their trip.

“Which way did you want to go, Keith?” he asks.

Keith reaches up again, and with the tip of a finger he outlines a path between two planets.

Chin in his hand, Shiro steps closer and leans in. The only issue Shiro can find with Keith’s route has nothing to do with Keith or his piloting. If three people and one canine on a single Lion were the only members of this party, Shiro wouldn’t hesitate to give Keith a pat on the back and ask him what he was waiting for. But in their current flight pattern, they run the risk of outpacing the others.

He surveys the other options. They don’t look promising. The most direct path they can follow is right at the junction of two separate solar systems, creating gravitational patterns and planetary obstacles that could have been straight out of Shiro’s senior year advanced deep space piloting textbook. Back then he’d had the time to study the problems, work the math out in his notebook, ask his professors for hints, Google anything he was hung up on. Back then, getting the answer wrong might’ve gotten him a single point off on a test of 20 other questions.

There is someone he knows will give him the right answer, though, if he asks.

“Do you think you can do it?”

Keith’s conviction is absolute.

“We can do it,” he replies.

Well, that’s that then.

Shiro claps his left hand down on Keith shoulder and says, “Go for it.”

He isn’t sure which one of them tenses first. If it’s Keith under his grip whose shoulders suddenly rise like hackles on a threatened cat, or Shiro’s arm that becomes stiff and rigid. Afterwards he likes to tell himself that it’s Keith, that it’s Keith who is made uncomfortable by the idea of what had spilled out of Shiro’s mouth and what that meant for the two of them. But if Shiro was honest with himself, he doesn’t know, because that’s the same moment that it comes flooding back to him that touching someone after telling them you think they’re gorgeous, no matter how innocuous the touch might be, is generally unwelcomed behavior.

Shiro pulls his hand back as naturally as he can manage, but he knows it must look like Keith’s shoulder burned him.

When he retreats back to his spot in the rear of the cockpit, Keith lets him go without a word.

* * *

 

“Hey, Keith.”

Keith turns towards him, and Shiro loses grip on his entire mental lexicon. It’s something to do with the way Keith has changed, he would think, if he were so coherent. Of course Keith has always been something well-crafted, painstakingly made, but the broadness of his shoulders and the look in his eye is deadly to Shiro’s capacity to think straight.

It’s disrespectful, and Shiro knows it. He knows that Keith deserves so much more than his gaze, even if he admires so much more than just what’s on the surface. Keith’s beauty is in more than striking eyes and a well-shaped countenance. But especially for someone who historically has problems recognizing his own value, there’s implications abound in the way Shiro reacts to his physical presence.

He hates it, but the force of his self-loathing alone isn’t enough to change him.

“I,” is all he can get out before Keith asks, “Are you feeling okay?”

Shiro lets out the built-up air in his chest as a sigh. He wasn’t even aware he had inhaled that deeply.

“Yeah,” he replies, because he knows Keith worries. About the arm, about his head, about the fact that he died and now inhabits the artificially-constructed body of his clone. “I’m okay.”

“Good,” Keith says, and before Shiro can say another word, he’s walking away.

* * *

 

“Is something up?” Lance asks. “Like, with you and Keith?”

Shiro checks the vat over the flame. The water hasn’t boiled yet. It’s been on the fire for awhile, but there’s a lot of it, and he doesn’t know if there’s some component to it that raises its boiling point.  

“No,” he says.

He’s not facing Lance, but he can almost hear him roll his eyes.

“Come  _ on _ , man. Usually if you’re even in the same room your hand is glued to his shoulder, but I don’t think I’ve seen either of you talk to each other in like, three quintants.”

Shiro is under no obligation to disclose the affairs of his heart to Lance. The team might be his family now, but in the same way you don’t tell your mother about your every fleeting fancy, Shiro is reticent to reveal his feelings here. It isn’t that Shiro doesn’t trust Lance. It’s more that he’s embarrassed.

He pokes a long stick into the fire, nudging a coal aside. It  _ crack-snaps _ under his attentions, but he can feel Lance’s eyes on him still.

“I said something stupid,” he admits, and hopes Lance will accept that and move on.

But Lance squints at him like he’s trying to see through frosted glass. Whatever he can read on Shiro is interesting enough to pursue.

“How stupid?”

“Uh,” Shiro replies. He makes a mental attempt to measure his statement. “Really stupid.”

Lance cocks his head. “Just apologize, dude. I can’t imagine Keith not forgiving you.”

“It’s not that easy, Lance.” Shiro raises his hand to his head and rubs his temples between his thumb and his middle finger. “It’s not something I can take back.”

With a groan, Lance sits back on the tree stump he’s perched on. His shoulders flop in front of him.

“Man, you guys aren’t gonna break up, are you?” he sighs. “That’d make things awkward. You can stay in my lion with me if you want but I’ve gotta warn you, Kalternecker is kinda stinky. Maybe Pidge—”

“Break up?” Shiro says.

“Yeah dude. Whatever it is I hope it’s not worth calling the relationship off over.”

It takes a moment for the individual words to coalesce into a meaning in Shiro’s brain. There’s something so disjointed about the ideas of  _ Keith _ and  _ relationship _ that they won’t fit themselves together without some mental push. It’s always been something safely stowed behind a “Do Not Enter” sign in Shiro’s mind. He could admire Keith’s beauty, his strength of character, his spitfire personality, the way he talks and the lines of his smile when he laughs, but Shiro has always known that anything beyond this is out of the question.

“Lance, Keith and I aren’t together,” Shiro says.

“You…what?”

“We’re not together. We’ve never been.”

Lance laughs, unsure, and it’s a sound like he doesn't know if he should play along with the joke. “That’s—You’re kidding, right?”

Shiro may act surprised by the concept, mostly to keep his sanity intact, but when he really thinks about it, this isn’t the first time. By the time Shiro had boarded the ship for Kerberos rumors already threaded the halls of the Garrison. Of course in those days they were unfounded. But something Shiro will never forget is the feel of solid ground beneath his feet, the natural light of a sun peeking over the desert sand, and meeting, again, the beautiful young man that Keith had bloomed into. He’s not surprised that he’s fielded dozens of questions about his relationship status since then, because he’s caught himself in the act of openly admiring Keith more times than he’d comfortable with.

“No,” Shiro sighs, and it comes out more lamenting than he intended.

That might be the reason the smile drops from Lance’s face.

“Oh,” he says. “I thought….” His face scrunches up. “If you guys like each other so much, why the heck not?”

Shiro inhales deeply. He still doesn’t want to be having this conversation, and not with Lance.

“It’s not like that,” Shiro replies. “Keith— He doesn’t….”

“It  _ is _ like that,” Lance insists. “He loves you, Shiro.”

_ I love you _ , he’d said, voice soaked with desperation.  _ You’re my brother. I love you _ .

“I know.”

Lance is missing some critical context, which is probably the cause for the confusion on his face. But he thankfully seems to decide not to pry further, shrugging his shoulders and leaving the conversation with an, “It’ll probably be fine if you talk it out.”

And realistically, Shiro knows he’s not wrong. Realistically, Shiro knows that the depths of Keith’s emotions where Shiro is involved are enough that they could consume and submerge anything that Shiro were to throw into them. He knows he’s not the first person in history to be entrapped by this situation.

But Shiro also knows the expression on Keith’s face when their eyes pass over each other. He knows that these past few days when they’ve come face to face, their speech has been littered with stammers and misplaced words. He knows that he’s taken someone with a fragile emotional skeleton, just beginning to strengthen his muscles over it, and bashed his skull in with a heavy, confessional rock.

It’s something that Shiro grapples with. How a pair of people who have known no stronger force than each other’s gravitational pull for years can suddenly be thrown out of sync by two innocuous words. Sound is nothing but vibrations in the air and yet somehow it’s knocked them both off their feet. “You’re my brother. I love you,” is couched in terms powerful but innocent. Keith’s heart was pure and steadfast in saying that.

“You’re gorgeous,” is a statement of a different breed. You can’t add any sort of familial modifier to that. At least not in Shiro’s position. “You’re gorgeous, bro. No homo.” It feels too cheap to even think about. Either way Shiro has revealed too much of himself. Where Keith had always found a steady hand to guide him, he now meets the poised body of a snake ready to devour him whole. It can’t be comfortable for Keith, and it certainly isn’t for Shiro.

So while talking to Keith is eventually going to be the solution to this problem, he knows he needs to give Keith time first. All Keith has ever needed was time.

* * *

 

It turns out that Keith doesn’t need time.

What he needs is this:

“I might be able to call the Black Lion to come get us,” Keith says.

But Shiro knows better, knows more. Shiro may have broken the bond between the Black Lion and Zarkon. In turn, Allura may have pulled his spirit out of the lion in its entirety, enough to sever their connection. Keith may have piloted the Black Lion in Shiro’s long absence, and be the sole Paladin with a connection to it now. But given the fact that the only immediate danger that he’s in is exposure to Shiro’s apparently uncontainable longing, he doubts the lion will budge for him at this distance. Black responds differently to emergencies than Red.

Shiro taps the side of his helmet. “Team? Allura? Pidge? Can you guys hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” Lance replies. “What’s up? You guys headed back soon?”

“About that….” Shiro peeks out the cave entrance. The underbelly of dark, swirling cumuli lights up blue with a bolt of lightning, and Shiro waits for its pursuing rumble of thunder to pass before speaking again. “We’ve been cut off from the Black Lion.”

There’s a clamor of voices from the other end: “How?” “Cut off?” “What do you mean?”

“We were chasing dinner,” Keith explains, in that matter-of-fact, tense-jawed way he has of explaining things.

“It was the size of a full-grown elk,” Shiro sighs, “but it was just a baby. And it ran right to its parents.”

“You guys couldn’t take them?” Lance asks.

“They were huge,” Shiro says, “and angry.”

“Given Shiro’s current state a retreat seemed better,” Keith says.

His eyes are on Shiro when he voices this, so soft that Shiro almost forgets to feel the rush of guilt and heartbreak. If he had a right arm, this wouldn’t be an issue. It was Keith who had made the call to flee, and Shiro who had unquestioningly trampled through the undergrowth into the woods after him, but he can recognize the logic in Keith’s decision when he properly assesses their defenses.

“Want us to come pick you up?” Pidge asks. “Are you guys in danger?”

“We’re good,” Keith says. “We’re just gonna be a little late.” He wanders to the edge of the cave, where his profile is suddenly sparked into a violent contrast by a fork of nearby lightning. He’s just as much a force of nature and twice as breathtaking. The crack of thunder after is almost immediate. “I think we’ll wait for this storm to pass and then head back to Black.”

“Take care,” Allura says. 

It was her idea to separate into pairs to find resources today. They’re stopped for the night on the uninhabited and barren Karrum-3-6, hospitable enough for their brief stay but lacking in some basic resources. Luckily its various moons have water and wildlife. Allura and Lance have gone to Moon 36 for fresh water. Hunk and Pidge to Moon 12 for firewood. Keith and Shiro, in the Black Lion, to Moon 23 to find something they can eat. The others in their party stayed behind to make camp.

For something like the dull tension that’s strung itself between him and Keith to tangle up a mission is unimaginable to Shiro. Just because he’s made a fatal interpersonal misstep doesn’t mean he has to drag anyone down with him, Keith included. Shiro is capable of being an adult and going alone with Keith to fetch dinner from the nearby moon shouldn’t be a difficult task. So he hadn’t let the vague uneasiness inside the Black Lion’s cockpit on their way here faze him, or the quiet part of their trek prior to getting attacked by a herd of angry antlered creatures larger than the Red Lion make him feel awkward.

But now it’s the two of them alone in this cave, and the adrenaline from their mad dash has finally washed away. It leaves Shiro feeling bereft, somehow now more than usual. The silence that settles between them feels thicker contained in the small space of the shallow cave, bubbled in from the outside world by pelting rain. They’ve both taken their helmets off to get some fresh air, and the lack of team chatter in Shiro’s ear makes the cave seem narrower. Keith settles down to sit on a rock at the mouth, but instead of looking out at the stormy landscape, he turns his head towards Shiro.

Red-handed, Shiro flickers his eyes away as fast as he can, but he knows it’s no use. Keith knows exactly what Shiro has been looking at, this entire time.

“Shiro,” Keith says, and his voice crackles in the cave like the weather outside.

Shiro’s eyes snap to Keith.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro’s mouth says before he can stop it.

Keith’s lips thin. He never keeps his emotions off his face, and now he’s obviously displeased.

“I don’t know why you’re apologizing,” he says. “Unless it’s about how weird you’re being.”  

_ You deserve this _ , Shiro reminds himself.

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “I know, I’ve been weird. In my defense, you were avoiding me.”

“You were avoiding me first.”

“I didn’t think you were ready to talk.” Shiro feels like a petulant third-grader even saying these things, but they’re hard and heavy in his chest.

“I’m ready,” Keith replies. His tone holds no give. “Why did you say that to me?”

_ Say what? _ is a question that Shiro doesn’t have to ask. There’s no reason to play dumb, to drag this out longer.

“Because it’s true,” Shiro says, and he’s never felt so helpless. “I didn’t mean to say it, but it’s true.”

Keith crosses his arms over his chest. Shiro feels himself breaking.

“I’m sorry, Keith,” he says again. “I didn’t want to tell you. I know this makes it hard to trust me after everything, but I promise, my feelings for you won’t get in the way of our friendship.”

Keith takes a long, lingering look at him with lowered eyebrows and an immovable mouth.  

“I confessed first, Shiro,” Keith says. “I said it first. Remember that.”

Shiro inhales, hard.

“You said, ‘You’re my broth—’”

“I love you.” Keith’s stare is unwavering. “I said, ‘I love you.’”

The rain patters against the dirt outside, in the rustling leaves of the trees, on the rock of the cave. In the far distance thunder calls. Shiro’s heart calls back, thudding hard against his ribs.

Keith sighs, and rests his forehead against his hand.

“This doesn’t have to be hard,” he says to the ground. He sounds angry, but Shiro knows he’s not, not really.  

“It probably doesn’t,” Shiro concedes, powerless and chagrined.

Keith allows this, but he gives Shiro a piercing look in response, his chin jutting out, his eyes cutting through to the core of everything that makes Shiro Shiro. He feels hot under his uniform, a sweat springing up on the back of his neck, his legs itching where his under layers cling to him. He wonders if it shows on his face with as much intensity as he’s feeling it, the hot prickle of a flush raging just under his skin.

Feline and predatory, Keith rises to his feet. Shiro is pinned like a butterfly to cork, and Keith’s gaze is a bullet through his chest.

But he feels the shift between Keith’s third and fourth step towards him. Something slips, and the wavering, faltering he sees there is something uncommon but not unfamiliar. Shiro’s seen it before. In the moment before boarding the shuttle that would take him to Kerberos. On the Blade of Marmora’s base when Keith had called after his hologram. When Keith had said goodbye to the other Shiro before leaving team Voltron for the Blade.

The realization cracks his ribcage apart, even as Keith nears until he’s face-to-face with Shiro. In the dark of the cave, Keith’s nothing short of heavenly. And as he approaches Shiro with his dark, probing eyes and his uncertain expression, it all suddenly shifts into place.

After all this, how could Shiro not know the only thing that Keith has ever feared was losing him?

“I think you’re gorgeous too.”

Keith’s speech sounds a little funny. Too tight, and gummy like his mouth is dry.

Instinctively, Shiro’s remaining hand rises to the void, the lack, on the right side of his body. He still expects to meet another arm there, even when he knows he won’t. This time, too, his hand slips through empty air and lands on the short remnant of a limb that he knows is gnarled and twisted with scars under his clothes.

But Keith’s hands fly up too. One to cover Shiro’s hand, and the other resting gently on the curve on his shoulder. His eyes travel from there across Shiro’s chest, up his neck, and to his face. Shiro feels them like warm electricity every inch of the way.

“You’re gorgeous,” Keith says again, this time filled with the same conviction as everything else he says.

For Shiro to find himself face-to-face with a creature so ethereal, telling him that he, too, is worth looking at, is enough to stop his heart in his chest. For a long moment he forgets how to breathe, how to think, how to  _ feel _ , but his overwhelming, overpowering  _ love _ for the man before him crashes down over him again, sweeping him away in its force.

Shiro gives in to the smile pulling at his mouth.

“Thank you,” he says.

Touching Keith has always been natural and easy, so the warmth of his palm against Shiro’s shoulder, interlocking his fingers between Shiro’s as they let their hands fall between them, isn’t strange. Shiro is grateful that this is a beauty he can feel against him. More than the distant stars or moons rising enormous and pale over the horizon of a planet, he can feel this, map it out with his fingertips. Keith shuffles closer and Shiro wonders if he can feel it with more than that. If he can bow his head, bend his neck, and understand what this kind of magnificence tastes like on his lips.

Keith must be feeling something similar because he tilts his chin up and looks at Shiro with intent. He’s never been good at concealing what’s going on in his head, and Shiro wonders how he could have missed the signs all this time. It doesn’t seem possible that he could know Keith so deeply, so intensely, but misidentify the nature of his feelings by such a broad margin. Shiro is self-aware enough to realize that there’s an aspect of his self-image issues at work here too, but that’s a problem to explore later.

For now, Keith’s warmth is pressed against him, and that’s the most beautiful thing of all.

“So gorgeous.” Shiro doesn’t realize he’s saying the words until they’re out of his mouth, but the result is that he gets to watch the pink spread over Keith’s cheeks.

“I’m gonna kiss you now,” Keith says, just loud enough to be heard over the dying rainfall.

Shiro rumbles a laugh from his chest and leans down.

* * *

 

Shiro can’t keep his eyes off Keith as he sets the skewers over the fire. The light is playing off his skin, his hair, his eyes, and Shiro willingly falls victim to it again and again.

But it’s okay. Because sometimes when he turns his gaze towards Keith, Keith is already looking at him. Or as he’s unabashedly staring, Keith will look up. Every time this happens their eyes meet, and the smile that Keith smiles is small, but it’s so sweet that it takes all of Shiro’s self-control to not put his mouth to it.

Somewhere behind him he can hear Lance dramatically gagging and muttering to Allura about regretting ever offering Shiro his advice. Shiro knows that they have millions and millions of light years to go until they reach Earth. He knows that the war isn’t over, that he doesn’t have an arm or a lion, that Sendak and Haggar and a hundred thousand other threats are still out there.

But Shiro can’t really complain. Things might be hard, but he can’t say he really minds all that much.

Not when the view’s this good.

 

**Author's Note:**

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